A Song of Mass and Effect
by KaiserKou
Summary: When an ancient enemy, long thought nothing but a myth, returns to the galaxy, they find the Seven Sectors of the Alliance on the cusp of civil war and total destruction. As no one heeds the war that could end the galaxy, two fighters arises to try to save all life from the coming darkness. Their name is Shepard.
1. Watchers

_Chapter One – Watchers_

* * *

 _October 13_ _th_ _, 2583_

 _Human Systems Alliance Space_

 _The Skade Fringe, on the edge of the Winterfell sector._

 ** _Prologue_**

"We should be heading back". Gared was the one who spoke up from the helm of the SSV Kalmar-NW, but Will had been thinking it too. And, despite Captain Wymar's swagger and smirking to the contrary, he knew what protocol dictated. Orders were orders.

Still, for nine ship-side days, floating through the edges of Terminus space, they hadn't called in once. And that was to be expected. They were Night's Watch. Hence the letters N and W burnished black into the side of every ship their ramshackle little fleet had. They were the dregs and the scum and the worst of the worst. Little supervision, even less red tape – a former merc like Will could appreciate that. Rules and regulations didn't too well with him. Never had. Which, granted, was the reason he had found himself in a Cerwyn cellblock four years ago, with an Alliance folder shoved into his hand by some official looking military bloke who looked like he had long since stopped giving a fuck. About anything and everything.

Sometimes it felt like only yesterday he had joined the Night's Watch.

Sometimes it felt like a lifetime ago.

Normally he wouldn't have complained about being a no-show for command. But tonight – as much night as it was, the nebula beyond the viewing panes of the Kalmar's cockpit filled with starry light from distant suns and only the red timer on the console before him showing any temporal keeping – tonight was different.

Somehow, even though Space was as empty as always and the lights of the frigate bridge didn't, Will felt as if the universe had started to grow dark around him.

And, faintly, he thought he heard the howling of a winter wind.

"Yeah, that's how one of the CO2 scrubbers sound's when it's busted to shit" Gared remarked at the noise, and Will drew an internal sigh of relief. So there weren't any monsters out there to kill him and eat his brains. _Thank God_.

"Lieutenant, Sir, we should be heading back" Gared, all steel-haired and lanky and veiny all over, like the poster-boy for military career grunts who never got farther than Gunnery Chief despite him being one of the OG assholes of the NW corps, took no crap. A stone-cold killer, experienced, forty years served in the armed forces and the Blue Suns combined. He had lost three toes and a finger when his squad was hit by a pirate's grenade back on Tytos.

His ears, however, had been taken from him by Batarians. During the Skyllian Blitz, when the Bats came pouring out of the Terminus, sweeping over human space like a deluge sent by the wrath of God. Ever since Shanxi almost three hundred years ago the Night's Watch had kept patrol on the edge of Human space. It stood to reason that the NW's were the worst hit of all, being on the front and all. Many had been killed, executed, or eaten. Some unlucky few had been captured.

Gared had spent two years in Batarian prison colony on Aratoht. He had been tortured. They had sliced his ears off there. And that was just the best of what he had endured.

So when Gared was telling them that it was time to get the heck out of Dodge, Will took the hook, sinker and line like it was a lifeline. Which, if the crawlies down his back was to mean what they usually did, it might very well be just that.

"Relax, Sergeant Gared" Sir Wymar Royce rolled his eyes at the veteran and smiled, almost kindly. Will looked up at their commanding officer from the weapons' system console, glaring at him. _Prick_. Not only was Wymar better dressed than the rest of them – a uniform in sterling black, neatly pressed, with buttons out of silver and the chevrons on his shoulder denoting his rank as a Lieutenant – but he was a nobleman too. All high and mighty, born in some mansion on one of the mightiest Alliance worlds in one of the seven principal clusters. He even had a sword on one hip, opposite his standard-issue pistol. A military academy graduate and everything: which was why a kid like Royce, dark and lean and dangerous as he might have looked, had command of the Kalmar even when Gared, Will, and all the other five crewmen on board had more experience in the field than him. "There's nothing out there" Wymar added, but Will knew it was bullshit.

Wymar Royce had been well prepared for the Night's Watch, at least as far as his uniform went. That served nothing but to make him foppish, just like the rest of him. They laughed at him in the mess sometimes, when he was in his private cabin of the tiny scouting frigate.

It was hard respecting a man you laughed at in your cups. Or following his orders.

Still, Royce knew something. Which was why he had them spend the last nine days going up and down the quadrant, scanners on constant deep-space forays. Something was off. About all of it.

And the crawlies down his back, a shivering sensation that had been constant ever since they left Cellador and Castle Black, came to his head when the chime from on the console before him broke the silence.

"Uhm" he cleared his throat as he brought the scan's results up to the front tab, and he could feel both Gared's and Wymar's eyes fall on the back of his neck as he swivelled to it. "Lieutenant, Sir. There's something I think you might wanna see, like".

"Display" Royce commanded, and with a flick of Will's finger the results of the scan were flung up on the main screen of the small bridge, hanging just above the holographic table where the Galaxy Map hovered.

"It's just a black spot, Will" Gared spoke up from the helm, clearly in derision. "In Terminus space. Space! It's probably nothing. We should be heading back to-"

"What am I looking at, Corporal?" Royce shut the older man up, and from the corner of his eyes Will saw Gared all but snarl, his hand twitching by the M-77 Paladin pistol holstered at his hip. For a second Will thought that Royce was about to get a hole through the skull, but Gared seemed to think better of it. _Thank God_. Lord Commander Mormont wouldn't have looked too kindly on them murdering a superior officer – even one who was as much of a ponce as Wymar Royce.

"It's just an object in Space, Sir" Will turned back to the readings before him. "Just something, like. I can't make sense of the readings, Sir. There's a constant low-frequency radiation output, though. Like a signal, almost. A hum" he added, and he heard Gared scoff. "There's a lot of Eezo involved in it, Sir. Whatever it is".

Royce nodded, a smile coming to his lips that was as tense and knowing as it was resolute. "Plot a course for it. Helmsman, take us there".

Gared glowered but lowered his head and swivelled back to the helm. "Aye aye, Sir".

And so the engines down below their feet hummed as the ship turned about and speared out into space. Out into the blackness, where no human had ever gone before.

"There should be nothing out here". By the time they reached the object the rest of the crew had crowded into the bridge. Staff Sergeant Kai, Wymar's second in command, who had a savage scar running down one of her cheeks to the corner of her lip, making her face twist into a constant sneer. Sergeant Damon, communication's officer, an ornery old bastard from Earth who had spent the first years of his life trafficking drugs and hookers to all over the Seven Sectors. Dax and Jem, two brutes who had to be half Krogan given how readily they took to their shotguns. And finally Linda. Linda, sweet Linda. She was frowning as she watched the Object through the panes of the cockpit, her hand on the shoulder of Will's chair. "This's empty space. Shouldn't be anything here".

"And yet there is something". Wymar seemed to ignore her gesture for once. Which was odd. He was often always one to berate and lecture on the Night's Watch's strict policy on fraternisation. Better than Commander Marsh, though. Marsh would have followed the rules to the letter and have them both shot. "Can you tell if it's active? I mean, is it emitting any surges of energy?"

"Active?" Will wondered at the word. As did the rest of them. Royce knew something. Still, orders were orders, and he was a commanding officer. Four years in the Night's Watch had taught Will to follow well enough. "Nah, I don't think so. It's not doing much, besides just sitting there. Besides humming. But these readings" he looked up at the Object, craggy like and asteroid perhaps almost eleven miles long, metal formations jutting from the inert construction. "It's got to be made from Eezo. Tons of it. Thing's got to be volatile as shit. One good hit at it and someone might just create a singularity".

"Better that than what would happen otherwise". Royce nodded to himself, as if making up his mind, before he began barking orders again. "Gunnery officer Linda, calculate optimal firing range should the thing implode on us. Helmsman, bring us there. Corporal, make sure to track-" he had time to say nothing else before the console in front of Will began chiming as the readings changed. But that wasn't the worst of it.

The Object began to come awake.

"Bow thrusters, on max!" Royce barked as the light filled the bridge, blue and cold and bereft of all things living. "Get us out of here, helmsman! Helmsman!"

But Gared didn't move. Fifty-seven years alive, forty-two years fighting and killing all over the Seven Sectors, years spent under the blades of the Bats – none of it had prepared him for what he saw then before him.

The Object's stony shell began to break away, bit by bit, cracking and crumbling to reveal a surface of slick, dark metal showing beneath, the same sort of alien superstructure that made up the Citadel and the Castle Black communicators. The same slick, thrumming, ancient design.

The same as an inert Mass Relay coming to life.

Coming to life because something was coming down the far side of it.

"Gared!" Royce barked, and by the anger in his voice they wanted to turn towards him and ask for orders, but could not. By the haunting light, the aeonian flames burning in the centre of the Relay's eezo core, they were transfixed. Terrified, in awe, Will thought he could feel the warmth of that power upon his cheeks. Feel the radiation burn through him. _God, it's amazing_.

All that turned to sheer terror when the ships accessing the Relay came through on their side.

"Goddammit!" Royce cursed as both Will and Gared bolted from their chairs. Suddenly there were things around them, shining chrome and translucent metal as cold as absolute zero filling the empty Space around the Kalmar. "Shit! Well, if this is how it's got to be" he bared his teeth and stepped away from the centre of the bridge, shoving Linda and Will aside to grasp for the gunnery controls. "Where the hell do I put in the firing solutions now again-?"

"Don't!" Linda begged, jumping to her feet, fright in her hazel eyes as she looked to the console. "You're targeting the Relay core! If it blows while active the rest of the sector goes with it! Us too!"

"That's the point" Wymar said, a cold smirk touching his face ever so briefly as his hands flew over the console, fingers drumming at racing speed. "Nothing out here. Nothing out here but that, us, and" he glanced up through the cockpit as a great hulk of a vessel, a spaceship, drifted past them almost lazily. "Them. That's the gateway into the Perseus Veil. The only unwatched Mass Relay leading there. If we don't destroy it and hold the line here-"

He had no more time to say anything. Or to tap in more commands into the console to finalise the firing solution. Through the hull, even through the reinforced and padded metals and insulation, they heard it. Thumps. Almost like someone, a hungry giant with a titanic fist, was knocking at their door. Seconds after the booms echoed through the ship the lights went out. All of them. Even the consoles. Suddenly the darkness had come for real, and as Will shuddered, huddling on the floor, in the darkness and the cold They came for them.

A metal screech was heard as somewhere, in the ship, the hull was pried open into a space with a pressurised atmosphere. Then silence. Nothing more. Not even the wheeze of the CO2 scrubber that had gone on the fritz. _No power. They must have hit us with one mother of an EMP_.

"All of you" Royce said from somewhere in the darkness, the silence broken by the ringing of steel as he drew the ceremonial sword from his hip "get behind me. Circle formation. Backs to each other-" a thump was heard in front of Will, who had the wall of the cockpit behind him. Somewhere, in the ship, something had landed. But he couldn't see what. The darkness was absolute, but the thumping came again, closer, nearer. But he couldn't see. The darkness was everywhere. It was everything.

He scrambled for the pistol at his hip, the handle slipping through his sweaty fingers. Four years, and the worst he had suffered in the Night's Watch was a pirate raid every now and then. Nothing worse than that.

This was much worse than that.

"Guns out, all of you" Wymar, in defiance of fear, held his ground before them, he knew that much by the voice alone. But the thumping was coming closer. Footsteps, Will realised. The footsteps of something big.

And the cockpit was filled with a cold blue light, blinding all of them. Scurrying back and away Will blinked through his hands, scampering for the far corner. Perhaps he wouldn't be seen there.

And what he saw was death itself.

Giant, tall, impossibly big, its shoulders streaked the ceiling of the bridge as it walked through the doorway. Even the top of it. The doorway bended and was torn apart by its dead strength with the sound of metal screaming in protest, without as much as breaking its stride. Its body was encased in heavy armour – no, it was armour, metal through and through, nominally bipedal even though everything about it was wrong, inhuman, impossibly wrong. And its head, its face – there was nothing there. Only that cold, shining light. A blue, icy light.

In it was nothing but hatred for all life.

But Royce wasn't scared. Somehow he wasn't. _God, that man must be mad_. "Let's dance, motherfucker!" Royce grinned like a madman as he pulled the pistol into his off-hand, his sword in the other, and levelled the gun at the machine as he charged it. Gared came after him, Dax and Jem after him in turn, Kai and Linda giving Will not as much as a look as they brought up the rear. From beyond the doorway more lights shone, watching in silence their lone machine brother as he was attacked. Standing by, doing nothing. Like spectators. Watchers, merely.

Watchers to the slaughter.

Will held back a scream, both hands before his mouth, as he watched Linda's head explode before him, taken in one clear shot from the Machine's arm and the muzzle of the blaster firearm thereon. As the crewmen began to fire the machine's shield soaked up all shots, shimmering about in an energy barrier impossibly thick.

And as the screams filled his ears Will watched Linda's body crumble to the grated floor of the bridge, headless, faceless. Gone. Her body was left, but he hadn't loved her for her body.

 _I love you_. He had never gotten to say that.

Wymar lasted the longest against the Machine. Even after Kai's entire gut had been blown away by the force of one of its shots, even after Dex bled out from his leg being blown away, even when Gared's head was ripped off his shoulders with such force that some of the vertabrae's of his spine dangled off the profusely bleeding stump that was his neck, Wymar kept on fighting. He moved like a viper with sword in hand, as lean and fierce and sharp as a dagger, grey eyes flashing, the very he himself a double-edged sword. The gun in his other hand flashed fiercely as he danced away and aside from the Machine's shots and blows, the bridge going up in flames around him as he did so.

A shot fired from the Machine scorched by him too close. And he could not dodge in time. Above the stench of blood and death the smell of sizzling flesh arose in the bridge as Royce stumbled back, his off-hand with the pistol held to the bleeding scorch mark of a glancing hit, blood spilling out over his fingers. The sanguine drops steamed as they hit the rapidly cooling deck beneath his feat.

Sir Royce was an asshole and a twit. That much Will thought he had known from the very start. But there, then, staring death in the cold blue eye, he found his fury. "For Robert!" he shouted and ran towards it machine, gun lifted as he fired on it until it overheated with a hiss.

In the end he broke through the Machine's shields, the sword lancing towards the metal of its breastplate – only to get stuck there. He tried to tear it loose from the crack in which it had been lodged, but to no avail. The Machine had him now.

Will shuddered in his fear. The EMP had knocked the life supports off-line, too. And even though some parts of the ship began to steam and cook when the heat sinks failed, the bridge was going cold.

By the neck the machine lifted Wymar into the air while its other hand reached for the sword lodged in its breastplate and shattered it into shards with nothing more than a twist. Wymar twisted and coiled, kicking and fighting and snarling into the last, but he never cried out once.

Not even when a spike of poisonous blackness extended from the Machine's arm and was imbedded in the back of his head with a sickening crunch.

And so it was over.

The Machine let go off him, and Wymar slumped to the floor just like Linda had, just like all the others had. Like a discarded puppet, a marionette with all its strings cut. Will had seen it happen before. He had been a member of the Watch for four years, and a merc long before that. He had seen it before.

So why was it so much scarier this time?

But the Machine, and its identical brethren, didn't move any more than that. They too seemed to slump, their shoulders lowering and their, their, their- their lights tipping forwards to dim and almost fade. Still there, but yet elsewhere. Asleep. Not dead though. He could see how their lights shifted and shimmered. He saw the back of the spike, surrounded by blood, imbedded deep in Wymar's skull. It emitted the only sound. A soft, soft, impossible whirring. It drilled into his head almost like it had to Wymar's.

 _I have to get out of here_. He looked up, swallowed, let out an involuntary gasp, but the machines still did not move. Motionless, like statues. Like statues of the angel of death over a graveyard. Shaking and trembling all over he reached for his pistol, holding it fast in his hand as he headed for the far broken doorway. The rest of them were dead –

 _Linda, forgive me_

 _–_ But he was still alive. The escape pod could hold him. He just had to get to it. He had to get to it. Maybe he could even manage to send a message to Callador and Castle Black. Yes, that he could. The escape pod's systems were shielded, weren't they? He could use it to get out of there. Lord Commander Mormont needed to know this. Something had come out of that hidden Relay, something that could destroy them all-

He stumbled over something, winching as it clattered before his foot. He looked down to see the hilt of Wymar's sword laying there, the blade in tatters, jagged and broken, but what stump of a blade there was left was still sharp. He didn't rightly know why he bent down to pick it up. Perhaps it was a weapon, as little and useless of one as it was. Perhaps it was a memento of someone who he had realised was much braver and nobler than-

When he straightened back up he came face-to-face with Wymar Royce.

Or, at least, the ghost of him.

His fine uniform was in tatters, his body bruised and broken. His face was a ruin.

But his eyes were open, burning cold. Burning blue. And they saw.

And as demons from the darkest of the galactic legends poured forth from the inky blackness to surrounded them Will ran for the escape pod.

Screaming.

* * *

 _October 17_ _th_ _, 2583_

 _Human Systems Alliance Space_

 _Eden Prime_

 _The Redwyne Verge, the Reach._

 ** _Jenkins_**

"Yikes!" he shouted and pulled his hand back from the front of the locker before him. Beside him, farther down the line of lockers in the Normandy Cargo hold, Alenko gave him a level look. He breathed out to calm himself before he turned and, with some trepidation, leant his arm against the locker, assuming a cocky stance and a grin. "Static, man. Caught me off guard".

"Yeah" Alenko shook his head and chuckled, visibly rolling his eyes. "Side-effect of the Tantalus Drive Core. Builds up static electricity like nobody's business in basically everything". He opened his locker and rolled his shoulders before he began to reach for his armour. "I've had worse. This ship I served on, back in 79? The wiring was off in the lights in the barracks, so they just kept flickering. All the time. Wasn't even that noticeable after a few months, but it still drove everyone nuts. Literally. The Normandy's a cakewalk in comparison".

"Honestly" he nodded as he too began to put on his armour – first the padded undersuit, slick against his skin, padded and feeling like he was being immersed in warm water when he put it on "it feels like overkill at times. The super-sized drive core, and the heat sinks in the hull? Why not just focus on making the ship either invisible or faster before trying to do both?"

"It doesn't make it faster, Jenkins" Alenko was good people. Most had a slight air of condescension about them when they talked to him, but not Kaidan Alenko. He was glad for it. "It allows it to go stealth – you know what I mean, right? – even when in FTL flight. It's only because of it that the heat sinks don't overcook in a second". He stopped and frowned for a bit before he shrugged. "Or so one of the guys in engineering told me. I dunno what the heck he was supposed to be going on about half of the time. Grenades, I get. Computers, I get. This crap? Not so much".

"Yeah, me too". He knew Kaidan's obliviousness was a little for his sake, more than it was earnest. He knew that he certainly wasn't the smartest tool in the box, but at least he knew about it. "Seriously" he went on, pulling on the plates to cover his legs and loins before he reached for his boots "this is way complicated, but you know what? It doesn't serve nobody none to navel-gaze. My mom used to tell me that".

"She's a clever woman then, your mom" Kaidan attached his breastplate, always before he did his britches. He was a little weird, that way, even considering that he was one heck of a powerful biotic. "So, you hear it on the news?" he wondered, seemingly a little careful. After he had secured his britches to his boots he looked up at Alenko and frowned. "I guess not. Well" he tensed his lips together before he explained "Jack Arryn's dead".

"The prime minister?" Kaidan nodded, and despite the hurry they were in Jenkins felt himself stop and deflate a bit. "From natural causes, right? I mean, he was pretty old in the years". Only twenty-five years ago they had been through a civil war that had all but destroyed the Seven Sectors of the human Systems' Alliance. Nobody wanted a repeat of the horrors of the Usurpation.

"They say it was a heart attack" Kaidan admitted slowly. "Though the word out there is that someone might have helped his heart along, you know? So Supreme Commander Robert is calling for another to take his place. And since it can only be a Lord Governor doing that" his scowl grew deeper as he pulled on his armoured sleeved and attached them to his pauldrons with a click and a hiss of pressurisation. "They said he's already nominated another for the position. Eddard Stark".

"Lord Ned?" Kaidan gave him a look as he put on his breastplate and the mechanical straps and winches secured it around him. "My dad was from Snowbourne. A little world in the Winterfell sector".

"Now, there's something that makes less sense than even advanced stellar engineering" Alenko commented as he secured his collar before he reached for his gauntlets. "There's seven sectors and the Iron Verge in the Alliance, right? Unless you count the Dornish principalities, which to be honest nobody does. The Sol cluster, Thespias, the Reach, the Poseidon Nebula, the Aurous Expanse, the Vale of Arryn and Winterfell. Out of all those, one of which is a smorgasbord of real paradise worlds and another which has a capital planet made up of at least five percent gold, they choose to live in the coldest gathering of white, blue and grey stars there is. It sounds just a little bit masochistic to me".

"Without the rain a man doesn't appreciate the roof over his head" Jenkins replied, just like dad would have done before he passed away. "And without the cold he can't feel the fire in his heart".

"Whoa" Kaidan blinked before he leant over and put a hand on his shoulder. "That's deep, man. It wasn't you who said that to begin with, was it?" Jenkins shook his head with a smile, and he got back a knowing nod. "Thought so".

"The Winterfell worlds was the first ever to be settled by humans, outside of the Sol star cluster" he paused, trying to remember his basics astragraphics. "Those, and those illegal colonies in the Valyrian Fringe. I mean, it's been almost five hundred years since Winterfell was settled. It's home to a lot of people. The Starks have ruled since day one of the landing there. Everyone's loyal to them there". Again, he frowned. "Except for the Phobos system, governed by the Boltons. But those guys are seriously weird. Anyway, what I mean is: the Supreme Commander couldn't ask for a better man to be his Hand. Lord Ned's honourable. Loyal".

"If you say so" Kaidan shrugged, and he nodded back empathically. "Right. I get that. Me, personally, I'd rather not get into politics. Gets you confused, and distracts from the mission".

"Hey" Jenkins exclaimed all of the sudden, remembering something. "Hasn't Shepard met the Supreme Commander? I heard something about that, once-"

"Supreme Commander Robert Baratheon?" a voice wondered at them from up the cargo hold, and both Jenkins and Alenko turned to see the war hero standing there, in the flesh.

Lieutenant Commander Yohn Shepard of Earth. The Shield of Elysium.

"Yeah, I saw him once" Shepard, nodded, running a hand down the upside of his head, his pate shaved bald to better fit inside his standard issue marine helmet. "He knighted me, after Shepard's Hill. During the Skyllian Blitz, on Elysium. Which is why I got this awesome surname" he shot them both a quick look before opening his locker. "Unlike you fancy sons of knights, lords and career military people".

"Hey, there ain't no lordlings around here, Commander" Jenkins defended their honour as Kaidan smirked and Shepard put his helmet on, already wearing his armour since before – red and black, in the colours of the N7 Guard, the elite of the special forces of the Alliance Military. "What was he like?" Past the visor of his old and battered helmet now put on Shepard arched a pale eyebrow, his eyes a piercing, fiery hue of violet. "The king. The Supreme Commander, I mean".

Shepard lingered on before he answered, trying to find the right words. "Fierce. Strong. Favoured a shotgun, just like me. Though he was fatter than on the Extra-net broadcasts". Jenkins blinked at the man as he stepped away from his locker and headed for the weapon racks on the far side of the cargo bay. "Now stop yapping. We make landfall in four minutes. Get your helmets on".

Kaidan shrugged and went about it, like a good little soldier. Like Jenkins normally would have done.

Instead Jenkins was looking at the back of his hero's head, thinking about how one's idols tend to betray you by being human.

And how much of a stab in the back that could seem to be, without really being anyone's fault.

He had served under Captain Anderson ever since he had passed basic and HEAT training, joining his command when he was just one of four Knight Commanders in residence on the SSV Tokyo, before he had ever been promoted to the Captain rank and gotten command of the Normandy project. Though under Anderson he had never seen any more action than a missed firefight when they took a rouge pirate stronghold on the edge of the Iron Verge, a band of seven systems and thirty-one colonised worlds that stood between the Aurous cluster and the fringes of Terminus space. Shepard hadn't joined them until much later, when Anderson was properly assigned to the maiden voyage of the Normandy.

Part of the reason for that had been political, no doubt. Shepard was a war hero, a man with songs written about him and statues of him commemorating the victory that the Skyllian Blitz came to be. Even this far out into the Reach, even out here on Eden Prime. Jenkins had grown up here. He had swum in the warm lakes below the spires of the four arcologies of Constant, the capitol, along with the hundreds of other children that had been his friends. When Elysium, deep in the Reach but on the edge of contested Batarian space, in the very same sector as Eden Prime, had been attacked they had gathered and held hands and lit candles for the dead. Those religious amongst them went to one of the state sponsored septs dotted around the towering structures that served as their homes along with worksman's modules and pastures breaking against the ceaseless fields and meadows and forests.

Paradise. More than any other world in the Reach, perhaps, it was paradise.

He had been a boy when the Skyllian Blitz began. He too had seen, along with his friends, as Supreme Commander Robert and Prime Minister Arryn, along with First Matriarch Lucretzia of the Asari Conclave, had handed out some twenty-two medals to people who had distinguished themselves valiantly during the Blitz. Most of everyone who served with Shepard saw the vids of the ceremony, sooner or later. How Shepard, battered and bruised and bandaged all over, one arm in a sling, had been made to kneel before the Supreme Commander to be knighted. How the First Matriarch had fixed the Pallidium Star to his breast, just next to where the Supreme Commander had pinned the seven-pointed Star of Terra.

Of all the people who fought and gave their lives and protected others by their own in those dark days of the Blitz, none was awarded as many honours as Shepard. Lieutenant Shepard, by then. Not more than that. Now he was Lieutenant Commander, well on his way to promotion to the rank of Knight Commander. Beyond that, who could say? Captain? Knight Captain? Wing Admiral, Flight Admiral, or even, perhaps, Lord Commander of the Fleet? Nothing seemed impossible, at least from the outside perspective. He was a legend in the flesh, after all. A hero.

And that should have been an uncomplicated thing, right? But it wasn't. Jenkin's idea of Shepard matched reality poorly. Oh, he was as every bit as commanding a presence as the vids had made him out to be. And he was understanding, always, shrewd but kind, a paragon of military honour. He hadn't been able to see Shepard in action in the field just yet, but for now…

He was a man. He read, he walked, he talked, he ate. And he was normal. He was a man. He should have been a twenty-five feet tall giant spewing fireballs from his mouth, like the Titan of Braavos.

And sometimes, sometimes something dark came into his vividly violet eyes. Something dark.

He frowned too much. _Don't go about your life frowning, Richey_ , mom had said once. _It'll do naught but give you wrinkles_. Maybe that was part of it. Or maybe he was just hurt over failed expectations.

And it didn't serve nobody none to navel-gaze.

Later, when their gear was assembled and they came in over Eden Prime, low in the atmosphere, the hangar doors before him the only thing keeping him from the place that had been his home, he stood at Kaidan's and Shepard's side when Captain Anderson gave them the sit-rep. "Your team's the muscle in this operation, Commander" his tone brokered no disobedience, that captain, as he stood before them with hands behind his back just like them. "Go in heavy and head straight for the dig site".

"Captain, sir!" Kaidan barked, and Jenkins glanced at the man, his brow furrowing into a scowl. "Permission to speak, sir?" Kaidan requested, and Anderson nodded. "What about survivors?"

Jenkins spotted something in the Captain's face – a fleeting look of pain and steely resolve – that was there one instant and gone the next. "Helping survivors is a secondary objective. The beacon's your top priority". The Beacon – some Prothean relic, supposedly. How could the Captain place the value of some hunk of alien space metal over the lives of human colonists? His family?

"Approaching drop point one" they all heard Joker's voice over the coms as the hangar bay doors cracked open just a hint, and in the roaring sound a figure emerged from down the engineering deck's doors, striding out with alien purpose. Six foot four, lanky and bony and avian within his heavily modified Havoc armour that fit the red-hued metallic carapace that was his skin, and on his face his markings were ornate and filled in perfect alabaster white. Every twist, every curve, every coiling of the marks was painstakingly made to perfection's notion.

Nihlus Kyrik, representative of the Turian Hierarchy, Trirchs and the Primarch, and Spectre of the Citadel Council, was not a Turian one wanted to mess with. Under any circumstance.

"Nihlus?" Jenkins called out over the roaring of the rushing wind in the cargo hold, the Turian Spectre giving them nothing of a glance as he walked on by them, checking his customised red and marron Phaeston assault rifle as he did so, the visor at the edge of his fringe sliding forward with a hiss to bring a screen of targeting data before his left eye. "You're coming with us?"

"I move faster on my own" the Turian replied, and even through the translator app integrated into the functionality of Jenkins's helmet he could clearly hear the distinctive Turian flanging of the voice on Nihlus's speech. With no other word that that the Turian set himself, readied for the drop, before he sprinted towards the cargo bay doors and threw himself out onto the open air.

"Nihlus will scout out ahead. He'll feed you status reports throughout the mission" Anderson didn't seem taken aback by the awesome that left Jenkins and Alenko completely out of breath. "Otherwise, I want radio silence. You copy?"

"Solid copy, sir" Shepard replied and hoisted his combat shotgun up onto his one shoulder, the pistol at his other hip hanging from a magnetic holster, the N7 logo on both his guns, his helmet and the breastplate of his armour. "We've got his back, Captain. You can count on us". Shepard had a hard cast to his face, though. Ever since he had heard that survivors weren't a priority.

"The mission's yours, Shepard" Anderson nodded before he marched out as Joker announced that they were approaching the second drop site. "Good luck".

They were dropped off on a small plateau jutting from the side of the craggy hills above the southern shore of lake Bacchus, two clicks out from the dig site that was their target. As soon as their boots touched the grass of the plateau, gasbags floating about in the distance around the crags of the hills, Shepard had him take point. That turned out to be a mistake. When they came around a bend in the hills the cause of the angry red colour of the sky was revealed.

And Jenkins stopped to watch and despair.

He remembered Eden Prime as it had been, its skies blue and vast and open, its seas quiet, its lakes warm and its far forests and mountains untouched, the spires on the horizon home to his friends and his people. Not like this. Never like this.

That blue, blue sky had turned red, the very atmosphere burning as a ship of truly gargantuan proportions, many hundreds of times larger than the largest of the Dragonship dreadnoughts that had assured human victory against each other and the Shanxi in the founding days of the alliance, hovered above it all. Smaller ships surrounded it, dreadnoughts in size for all Jenkins could tell by perspective, streaking past the ship as they battered down the planetary defence forces's AA-guns and gunships like they were nothing but flies.

Down it went, that giant, dark and titanous, as mighty as the storm as the beams it fired burned through all things and everything, as all-encompassing in the heavens like the hand of a raging vengeful god. From its tentacles shot beams of light, lasers, burning angry red and icy blue as they scorched the land, burned the fields and vaporized the flames of his youth, reaping the world with scythes of plasma fire. With every move it groaned, and its poisonous song filled the air along with the ichorous black smoke that rose from the destructing it wrought.

He stared at it. He couldn't help but stare at it. How could one possibly fight _that_? "Jenkins!" a stern voice barked. "Jenkins!" A firm hand grasped his arm and turned him about, violet eyes affixing him through the visors of their helmets. "Get your head screwed on straight, kid!"

"They're destroying everything!" he shouted back, anger burning in his breast as he slapped away Shepard's hand. "All of it! This is my home, Commander! They're-!"

"Doing what always happens during a lower orbital bombardment, kid" Shepard cut him off, as decisive and stern as the cliffs in the hills just north of their position. "You'll see a lot more of stuff like that in your career if you get your head back in the game. Focus. Don't, and you die". Nodding to him Shepard pushed past him and began the trek down the slope overlooking Lake Bacchus, proceeding towards the objective. Kaidan came up to Jenkins after him, though, laying a hand on his back in support, giving him a look of encouragement and understanding.

The two of them followed Shepard down the slope towards the path down below. Jenkins only had to look up to see the arcologies of Constant on the far side of Lake Bacchus. Those spires still stood, thankfully enough. _Praised be the Seven_. Even A-3, the one where his mother had her apartment. It was late in the evening. Surely his sisters had come home from high school now-?

In the sky the beams turned, and he stopped and stared in disbelieving horror as one of the raging white-blue beams burned through the air at impossible speed. It sliced through rock and hill and mountain and lake and- _Gods, no!_ "No!" Jenkins shouted as the beam began to slice into the arcologies, cutting A-1 in half before moving on. "No! _No!_ "

Beg and pray as he might have, he could only watch as the ship burned its weapon through all the arcology spires, only watch as the tall tower-cities burned and broke and fell to earth.

"No!" he shouted, hefting his assault rifle up as he made to run towards it, despite it being almost seven miles away. "Mom!" He skidded down the slope, past both Kaidan and Shepard, his heart hammering in his ears as he surveyed the banks of the lake as he looked for transports. There were fisheries, weren't there? Pleasure yachts or fishing boats, anything that could take him across to-

Busy as he was trying to find a ship along the empty shoreline, where there was nothing but sand and Edenic Crabs, he didn't spot the hovering combat drones until it was too late.

They came around the bend at the down of the slope, cold blue blazing from their mechanical eyes, a gathering of five of them scouring the countryside for survivors and fighters and intruders that could jeopardize their mission. Jenkins didn't know that or see that, though – all he saw was a glimpse of their cold chrome shells and the flashing of the muzzlefires by the bolts of the pulse weapons suspended beneath their gracefully hovering bulks.

And all he felt was the pain as the blasts ripped through him, and the thud against his helmet as he was thrown to the ground by the force of the shots.

"Man down!" Kaidan shouted as the sound of returning fire from by humans manufactured firearms began to respond. Jenkins struggled to sit up, to lift his weapon, maybe even to lift his head to see, for once at least, Shepard in action, but couldn't. As soon as he moved the pain in his chest and gut seemed to writhe and explode. All he could do was to lay there and sob against the agony as the gunfire was punctuated by explosions, and then ended. All he could see when he looked up was the sky over Eden Prime, the heaven of his youth, burning.

"Hang in there, Richey!" As silence fell someone came to his side, crashing to his knees beside him – Kaidan, it had to be, no one else sounded so rough, like he was in the grips of a constant migraine –while something cradled his head. "Hold on! Medi-gel, Commander! Stat!"

"They ripped right through his shields, Kaidan" Shepard answered as a voice somewhere by his head. "His armour too. Like it was paper. He never stood a chance".

"They-" he coughed, and warm saliva – wait, spittle wasn't supposed to be hot and thick and taste like iron, was it? - filled his throat and mouth. Breathing was hard, he was beginning to discover. It was all getting so clear now, actually. Breathing was something you had to do. And, really, it was quite easy to stop doing it.

"What?" Shepard asked, still frowning when Jenkins opened his eyes to look up at him, his head cradled in the Commander's lap like he was a child. _He should do that less. He'll get wrinkles_. "Did they do something, Jenkins? Did you see anything?"

"They" it was all starting to make sense. All of it. Like someone had cleared away all the distraction. Still, one thing was bothering him. "They b-" he coughed up a stream of blood, splattering over the front of Shepard's fancy black and red armour. "They b-burned my world, Commander. D-destroyed it. W-" he couldn't quite get it out. Too much blood where it wasn't supposed to be. "W-why?"

"I don't know, kid" Shepard was shaking his head. He looked so grim. Was that the face of a hero? "I don't know why. I'm gonna find out, but it doesn't matter now. What matters" he grabbed at the shoulder of his armour. Armour? There wasn't any armour, was there? He was floating in the warm lakes beneath Constant. And Dad was there. Calling him. "What matters is that you get back on your feet. This is your world, Jenkins. Stand up and take it back".

No. It was all so clear now. He didn't really want to go see mom and dad, not with his fancy armour all dirty and filled with holes, but he had to. They were calling on him. To get out of the water. To go home. Home, where the house was whole and his sisters were still alive.

"Goddammit, Richey, stay with me!" Kaidan shouted at him, from so far away. He could hear him, but he couldn't see him. He was swimming in that warm lake again, and he was home. "You dumb asshole! Don't you dare die on me!"

"Kaidan-" he heard the beginning of Shepard's words of comfort, but not the rest.

Everything was going dark.

* * *

END

* * *

 **A/N** : I was writing on my own original stories when this little idea here occurred to me, and it just wouldn't let me go until I had written it down. I won't update on this until I have finished my own personal works, but…

… it's one hell of an idea, wasn't it? I'll continue it once I have time to do so.

The settings mesh quite well, though a bit of contortion is required before things start to make sense. Namely:

The timeline of Mass Effect is stretched out, beginning in 2067 when the people who would come to be known as the Valyrians leave the Sol system on an experimental Mass Relay jump and wind up deep in Batarian space, ending in 2583 and the story's present day. In this contains two hundred years of rapid expansion, settlement and eventual chaos and anarchy before the Targaryens show up during the Shanxi war, followed by three hundred years of colonisation, wars and less-than-frequent civil strife.

As for the Seven Kingdoms, herein the Seven Sectors (not counting the Dornish systems and colonies), their names had to be changed a little to fit the Mass Effect sci-fi setting. The Westerlands became the Aurous Expanse, and the North was changed to the Winterfell Cluster, since, you know, there's no north in space. The Sol cluster is the Crownlands, Thespias is the Stormlands named after Theispas – an Uratian god of Storms – and the Poseidon Nebula is the Riverlands. The Iron Islands become the Iron Verge, and the Sunset Sea and the lands beyond the Wall becomes Terminus space while Essos becomes council space.

The Winterfell Sector is the furthest to the galactic north of all the sectors, though, so some still call them Northerners, and they themselves still go around calling basically everyone Southron.

As for the other cultures, roughly it goes thus: Asari = Lyssene, Turian = Volantis (not really, but kind of), Salarians = Braavosi, Krogans = Dothraki, Batarians = Ghiscari, and the Volus = Quartheen.

Lastly, a quick note on names: the smallfolk don't have surnames, normally. Only knights, lords and people promoted into the CO ranks of the Alliance Military has them. Military service thus often follow family or distinction. Kaidan's father, per example, was knighted, while Ashley's great-grandmother was a planetary Lord.

As for the story – we'll see where it goes, yeah? Send me PMs with House Words for our characters, ideas you have, or feedback about the setting. As far as I've know this cross-over has never been attempted before.

Fem!Shep makes an appearance in the next chapter. This was all about setting the mood - the next starts things off properly.

I hope you have enjoyed this chapter. The best is yet to come.

Ta.


	2. Champions of the Age

Chapter Two – Champions of the Age

* * *

 _October 17th, 2583_

 _Human Systems Alliance Space_

 _Eden Prime_

 _The Redwyne Verge, the Reach._

 ** _Yohn_**

"Kaidan, listen to me!" He couldn't have his people fall apart on him. Not now. Not when the ship filling the sky above was destroying Eden Prime, and humanity's future was on the line.

"What?!" Alenko shouted back to him, face distorted by grief while his hand was at his cheek and the button to activate his coms. "He was my friend, Shepard! My friend! And I can't even call in his death?!"

"Radio silence, Lieutenant" he said as he rose to stand face to face with Kaidan, letting Jenkin's corpse thud unceremoniously to the ground. "That's an order. From the Captain. Remember?" Glaring back at him, dark eyes gleaming, Kaidan finally nodded, and he nodded back at him in turn. "We'll see that he receives proper service once the mission is complete. But I need you to stay focused".

 _That's it? We just burry our friends and go on with the mission?_ He saw that question in Kaidan's look, a question unvoiced but still there. Shepard knew it. He had held that very same question in his heart the first time he lost a comrade in the field. "Aye, aye, sir" he instead answered, as was appropriate given their chain of command. And so they set off once again, marking the spot where Jenkins had fallen in their memories. He had been a good kid, if a little eager, if a little dense. He wished he had gotten to know him better, but now he couldn't. Still, there was no time to mourn.

They had a mission to accomplish, after all.

Yohn liked Eden Prime well enough. Breathable air, pleasant temperature, lush Earth-like vegetation. If not for the whole under-attack-from-forces-of-primordial-evil thing, he might have considered buying some property or land on the planet. Who was the Lord over the planet? The one who made sure that all the planetary Lords and Aldermen did as they were told, who collected tithes and taxes and made gears of industry and chivalry keep on churning? Risley, wasn't it? Maybe he could buy some land off of the Lord or Lady and begin to save up for retire-

 _Retirement?_ As he and Kaidan moved on towards the objective, ducking under trees and around boulders for their path took them through a forested area, he scoffed at himself. _No way_. Only two thirds of all Alliance military personal, especially along the fringes of Alliance space and in the hazardous systems, ever reached retirement age at eighty-five. And most left for the private sector before even that. If it wasn't pirates or mercs or faulty suits on armour on hazard worlds that got to you it was greed and betrayal and politics. And besides, who was he kidding? He lived for this shit.

Just like Rhea did.

As always, the thought of Her made him scowl with both concern, wistfulness and annoyance. He put his worry from his mind and focused. Jenkins hadn't focused, which was why he was dead. He gripped the brace of his shotgun harder and pushed the stock harder into his armoured shoulder. He set his eyes like stone and did his heart the same. He had a mission. He had to see it through.

And Anderson could say whatever the hell he liked, but he was not going just leave the civilian survivors of the devastation of Eden prime to die at the hands of the machine menace.

Because, honestly, whomsoever thought a beacon and some advances in technology was more important than human lives could go, respectfully, go screw themselves.

He had sworn two things when first enlisting: to protect, and to serve. In that order.

Nothing else really mattered. Not to him. Nothing else but the thrill of the fight.

They ran into little resistance as they moved with as much hurry as they could down the slopes of the forest towards the valley where the dig site was supposed to be. At least he thought so. His Omni-tool map was on the fritz, and Jenkins had supposed to be their guide. But if they continued along that path, towards the cliffs yonder-

And it was peaceful no more. From out among the trees the whirring things came, hovering capsules fronted by merciless blue light panes, pulse guns suspended beneath their bulks like metallic cocks of laser death. And they were flying. That was the worst of all.

Kaidan seemed to have been expecting, judging by the way he didn't even twitch before he dived into the cover of a boulder on the forest floor and hunkered down, gun at the ready. Shepard on the other hand took cover behind a tree – and instantly regretted it. The bolts of the superheated pulses cut straight through bark and stem and missed his helmet by a hair, grazing his kinetic barriers.

Energy shields did nothing against their weapons, as by Jenkins evident. He had Kaidan had only gotten through the surprise attack unscathed due to being biotics the both of them. Biotic barriers, like most, was only easily battered away by other biotic attacks. Human biotics had allowed Aegon Targaryen to crush the Systems' Commonwealth that had come before him and establish the Seven Sectors of the Alliance with himself as its Supreme military, political and hereditary Commander. By his biotics he had made an empire out of the fractured mess that had been humanity.

His biotic soldiers, and his dreadnought dragonships. With those Aegon had made of a shattered smattering of human colonies and titular kingdoms into the Alliance that still represented humanity to that very day Shepard breathed in now.

But Aegon was dead. His dynasty, shattered when the hammer fell on prince Rhaegar. Every fleet, every sector, had biotics just like everyone else. And no one in the galaxy had dragonships.

These were different days. Free days or dark days – that's where opinions differed.

As a soldier he shouldn't have concerned himself. He should have looked at that monster of a ship in the sky and the dozens of smaller, still giant, ships attending it and thought of nothing but the mission. But his mission was technology, to retrieve a Prothean artefact, and somehow he found it hard to care.

He knew not quite why. As he pulled the pistol from his hip and shot out of cover, holding one of the drones still in the air by a surge of biotic power while he shot it with his heavy pistol until the shield were overloaded and the next bolt went through the glowing light that served as its ocular sensors, he found it very hard to care about the Beacon.

It was just technology. Yes, that was it. Guns and ships and bombs could kill, but people had to use them to them to actually be of any use. Soldiers and civilians, that was what was important. Weapons and all the technology in the universe wouldn't change that.

As they downed that squad of hovering killing machines of death Nihlus's voice chimed in the coms in his helmet, by his ear, reporting some same as it had been before, same as it was from time to time. Lots of bodies and burned out buildings, few actual hostiles. The enemy, whomever they were, gathered elsewhere – but for what? Had they already secured the Beacon, and were heading elsewhere? Then what were all these drone squads? Why were they so focused on killing anything human-looking that so much as moved? Was it merely a perimeter scan against potential threats to their objective?

Or was their actual directive to exterminate human life?

He didn't know. Too many unknowns. And you couldn't plan battles when blinded by the fog of war.

The forest grew sparse, the trees bigger and the trunks thicker but farther apart than before, and around the bend they saw a slope, and there below, before his and Kaidan's eyes-

Destruction.

A small clutch of survivors lay in the hollow of a blasted-out transportation vehicle with ten consecutive wheels, and as a clutch of those floating recon capsules with pulse weapons suspended beneath them swivelled about a soldier in scratched, burnt and dented armour who had been running for them. As the shots fired around her forced her back a pair of gangly shapes intruded on the scene, weapon modules protruding from their metallic arms and strange rifles of almost liquid metal shapes held in their hands. They came around the bend of the toppled over car, and from their faces, or where their faces should have been, a cold light emitted, singular eyes of blue that saw more than living eyes ever could.

That woman, in the armour – she was good with the pistol, perhaps even better with the assault rifle slung onto her back. She stumbled and threw herself back, skidding along the ground, down and away from the fired blasts of the drones, skilled shots striking the machines coming after her head on in the sensors and taking them both out. It was a fancy move, worthy of special forces rather than a glorified infantry grunt, but Shepard was distracted from the motion almost immediately.

One of the civilians that had stumbled and fallen was grabbed by those strange, tall, machine things, those cyclopean butchers of men, and lifted into the air, still kicking and fighting and screaming for help. Before Shepard had done as much as lift his pistol though, the machine had moved. It flicked its wrist, its entire three-digited hand snapping back, and from its arm a spike jutted of pure blackness, its surface slick and shimmering like a pit of tar in the centre of the abyss. Thrusting forth the machine plunged the spike into the back of the civilian's head, and with a splatter and a pool of cooling blood they were discarded on the ground for naught before the two of them turned to face the woman in armour – and Shepard and Kaidan, just then coming out of the woods.

She had good instincts, Shepard thought as he and Kaidan hit the first advancing robot – it could be nothing else, though it looked light-years more sophisticated than any mech he had ever seen – with double biotic blasts. Under the cover of their attack she sprinted for the cover of boulders and hunkered down behind them, panting and holding her assault rifle close to her as she waited for it to cool down. She flinched when she heard gunfire smatter, but looked up to see him and Kaidan advance with pistols held high, her dark eyes shimmering with relief past her muddied visor.

Those tall shapes – they were some tough bastards. It took all Kaidan and the woman with the assault rifle all they had to take one of them out, Alenko hitting it with all the tricks he had but the thing still resisting his diffusion and overload protocols somehow. Perhaps it was using an operating system foreign to their combat-optimised Omni-tools. Which meant that they were not of either Council, Alliance or Terminus space, which in turn didn't leave a lot of doubt about what they actually were.

While Kaidan and the woman handled their killer robot Shepard went after his own. He was reaved up, now. And with his biotics blazing about him he felt like no power in the 'verse could stop him.

Taking cover behind a boulder he slung his pistol onto his hip and made sure that his shotgun was secure where it hung before he rolled is shoulders and focused. He counted silently – 1, 2, 3, 4, 5 – and true enough, the flying recon machines came for him, circling around to flush him out of cover. Pre-programmed scenarios that they had been optimized to counter. Their machine nature made them predictable. He lashed out with both his arms and seized them both in biotic fields, turning them about to fire against each other with singularity pulls, and when they crashed to the ground he pulled all his power into his barriers and stepped out of cover.

The machine stood before him, its shell silver chrome without designations or patterns. And why would it have? It was a machine, with no need for rank or individuality. The shots of its rifle were perfect counters against physical matter and energy shields, but biotically generated kinetic barriers it could only bash away at with heat blasts. It took kinetic energy to batter through them.

Hence why Shepard smirked as he pulled out his shotgun after the bolts fired from the machine's rifle dissipated against his barriers and levelled it towards the metal monster. He walked towards it, calmly, slowly, firing the shotgun with every step. His trusty M-23 Katana, no frills or mods – he just kept on firing it, and the energy shields around the machine were shredded by every blast. The last one, fired when he was only five feet away from it, smashed into its midsection, tearing at a loadbearing structure of some sort, and it collapsed down on its knees leaking clear blue fluid that froze the ground and the grass where it fell. Even though it still held its rifle it could not get out one more shot than the last one that made Shepard shake all over as the energy almost generated enough of heat to melt the paint off the surface of his armour. Still, he dropped the shotgun into one hand before he lashed out with all the energy his barriers still contained and punched the machine through its flashlight-looking head.

Quiet fell around them after Kaidan and the armoured woman managed to disrupt their machine's shield to explode its head with one of Kaidan's grenades. He approached them as Kaidan sagged to the ground, clutching his head in his hands. "N7" she panted out as they helped Kaidan stand, her eyes fixed on the emblem on the breast on Shepard's armour, just above the heart, flickering for an instant towards the stripes down his right arm and then onto the company badge on his left shoulder that displayed the personal arms of the Supreme Commander. "Gunnery chief Ashley Williams, of the 212th Reach infantry!" she saluted as she stood straight. "Are you the one in charge here, sir?"

He hefted his shotgun and inclined his head in the affirmative. "Are you wounded, Williams?"

She hung her head before she shook it. "A few scrapes" she rolled her shoulder "agh, and burns. Nothing serious, sir". Her face fell as she looked to the vehicle, not a one of the survivors still alive, all five laid low by the machines and their spikes of shimmering darkness. "The others weren't so lucky".

"Sit-rep, Williams" he told her firmly, seeing the tell-tale streak of shock and survivor's guilt already set in on her face beneath the helmet. "Tell me what's going on. Where's the rest of your unit?"

"Oh, man" she swallowed hard before she began. "We were patrolling the perimeter of the dig site when the attack hit. We tried to get off a distress call, but they must have cut our communications. I've been fighting for my life ever since". She shook her head, scowling. "I don't think any of the others-" she stopped and breathed out hard before she went on. "I think I'm the only one left, sir".

"This isn't your fault, Williams". He didn't know that for sure, not really, but odds were good that they would have died anyway, given the monster in the sky and the monsters around them. "There wasn't anything you could have done to save them".

"Yes, sir". She heard him, knew what he meant. But he could tell that she didn't believe him. "We held our position as long as we could. Until the Geth overwhelmed us".

"The Geth are a myth" Kaidan said from aside Shepard, almost threatening in his scepticism. "Even if they were real, they haven't been seen outside the Perseus Veil in over six hundred years" he added once he saw Shepard's look. "Why are they here now?"

"The Beacon". Williams nodded back at him as he answered that question for all of them, panting still. "They must have come for the Beacon". Just like they had. Just like the Council had. If a race of mythical monsters had emerged back into the light of the proverbial day for it, how important was this artefact really? "Where is it?" And what secrets did it hold?

"The dig site's close, sir" Williams spoke up, clearing her throat before she lifted her arm to point to the north of their position, past the carnage and the horror. "Just over that rise. It might still be there".

"We could use your help, Williams". She seemed composed well enough, and ideally he would have wanted an entire Marine wing at his back for this mission, or at least a company. But she would have to make due, and she seemed to use her weapons well enough. "Can you fight?"

"Aye, aye, sir" she nodded, and fell in behind Kaidan as all three of them began to set off towards the dig site. "It's time for payback".

But there was nothing at the dig site. Oh, there was something. A single Geth, loitering around – a sentry, no doubt – in ominous dark stone ruins, the top of some great structure that had once been covered with a dome centred around a dais upon which a much brighter shadow marked the spot where the Beacon had stood. It was gone. Moved, and impressions in the ground around the dais showed prints matching the metal heels of Geth leaving northwards, up a rise and towards the archeology camp on the top of the ridge. Past that, Williams informed him and Kaidan, lay the spaceport of Eden Prime, a short trek merely, and up the rise they went, up towards the far dig site camp. A camp that had been thoroughly destroyed.

"Looks like they hit the camp hard" Kaidan spoke the understatement of the century as they walked in amongst the shattered habitats and burnt tents placed around crates and bundles of supplies and tools, bodies all about them, numbering perhaps a dozen all-in-all. "Slowly, Williams" he urged her as they went, like she was some kind of rookie, neither of them hearing the soft whirring on the air that Shepard did. "This is a perfect place for an ambush-" he stopped when one of the corpses before the, shuddered, jerking, muscles cramping as it slowly heaved its feet to rise. "Father Above, they're still alive!"

Not quite. "What did the Geth do to them?!" Williams shouted aloud as the dead thing snapped its gaze upwards and stared them, its eyes blue and cold and burning with hate, shimmering with an inhuman facsimile of life. But no more questions could be asked. Every single of the corpses in the camp rose around them, some slowly, some quickly, but when they all were on the standing they attacked as one.

They were dementedly hard to kill. Unshielded and unarmoured, they still charged on them, ripping and tearing and gouging with arms and fingers and fingernails made stronger in death than they had ever been in life. One came for Shepard, and it refused to die until he had all but blasted its head off and overheated his shotgun in the process.

The damn things were strong. Blastedly so. But if you took off the head, he discovered when he was using the butt of his shotgun as a club while Williams fended off three on her own and Alenko was busy forcefully introducing one husk of a man's face to a metal container, they were taken out of the fight. The bodies died if the heads came off, but they still lived. The heads lay on the ground, still slavering, still snapping at their heels if they came to close, jaws powerful enough to dent their armour and take a large chunk out of even kinetic barriers.

His shotgun cooled down he blasted one over the back of the head as it went for Williams along with some of the others, it toppling over instantly. _Interesting_. He smashed one over the skull with all the force he could muster, aided by biotic power, and it flew back, neck broken and brow-bone shattered. Still, it only died when the back of its head was crushed under his boot.

And so his hypothesis was confirmed with the patented Shepard-Scientific Method. "It's like the Apocalypse, sir. The end of days" Williams, collapsed on the ground, panted once it was all over, Kaidan off to one side with his hands to his head, face streaked with sheer agony, electing a quiet whimper of 'it burns' even while Shepard helped Williams back onto her feet. "And now even the dead are rising".

"It's not. They're not". He reached down and grabbed the end of the spike imbedded in the back of the head of one of the creatures they had all but had to rip apart to kill. "It's this". He heaved with his shoulders and pulled it free, and with the spike, writhing slime-covered tendrils coming with it along with chunks of brain and bone and nerves and even what little remained of the eyes. "It must have fused with the central nervous system, taking over all motor functions". By his best guess, anyway. But he could tell what they were for. "Shock troops, wearing the faces of friends and families".

"Scary effective, Commander" Kaidan went on as Shepard crushed the machinery in his hand, breaking it into component parts. "Of all the weird things I have shot, Shepard, Zombies takes the cake and goes home with it". It was by then that the two of them noticed his continuing frown. "What's the matter, sir?"

"The Geth – don't give me that look, they're Geth, and I'll eat my helmet if they turn out not to be Geth – they're machines". He looked to them, seeing them both panting, Williams clearly exhausted. "Glorified calculators. They didn't do this to frighten us. Machines don't have emotional response. They aren't frightened". Unless some real sadistic asshole had programmed them thusly, they only understood emotional response on a conceptual level. "They don't understand fear. These creatures, these husks – they aren't meant to just put us on edge. Sensory input alone could do that. They're here to soften us up-"

And hardly had he finished that sentence when all of them came to know for certain that it was a trap.

While the decapitated Husks still around them chimed and growled in the zombified song four Geth appeared from out of the shadows of the destroyed habitats that they had been scouring, recon drones above them and a gathering of Husks leading the way for them, all guns blazing towards Shepard and his little squad. They dove for cover, Shepard dragging Williams along with him while Kaidan, only focus shouldering the burning hurt in his head, covered them as he, by help of some crates and a battered down habitat wall erected a makeshift barricade.

Almost immediately Kaidan and Williams started to argue, both worn down and haggard after fighting an enemy they hadn't been prepared for. It was almost comical – Kaidan requested a grenade, Williams said she hadn't any, he wondered what kind of shoddy infantryman didn't carry grenades, she replied that it was the kind that didn't rely on implants and "space magic" to do the heavy lifting for her, and on it went, for everytime they made to help Shepard pushed them down. They were badly off, and there was no time to rest or get them back into fighting shape just yet. And he could handle a few of them, at least nominally. With shotgun and pistol and half a dozen grenades, the ones he still had on him along with the ones Jenkins had been carrying, he held the line, which was a nothing matter compared to the hell that had been Elysium. He managed to get the husks out of the fight and one of the Geth before he felt- he felt something.

"Zip it, both of you". It was the tone of his voice, not the volume of it, that silenced them, and they looked to him as he stared up towards the sky, his eyes straining as he listened. "Do you hear that?" Or was he just imagining it? Imagining that familiar presence, the feeling, the-?

"I don't hear anything except-!" Kaidan shot back before he too noticed it, at the same time as Ashely did. Over the cacophony of the of the pulses of plasma fire and the distant explosions and the roar of that humongous dreadnought that filled the heavens over Eden Prime he could hear, ever faintly but growing n strength and intensity- "Is that _Cotton-Eyed Joe_?"

"The fuck-?" Ashley scowled as she heard the bassline and the maddened frenzy of the fiddles sound come more into focus along with the hideously fake accent of the singer. "How the-? Wait, look!" she pointed, and they both saw a spot, over the edge of the horizon, zipping to and fro to avoid being hit by the gunships of the invading machines. An Alliance fighter ship, barely enough to hold one person, coming closer.

Approaching on a collision course with them, with old Earth music blasting out of its forward projectors. He saw the colours of its hull and the Wing badge painted on it, and groaned aloud, slapping his hand to his brow.

 _Please no_. Shepard prayed, to the Seven of the state-sponsored faith, to the thousand gods of the thousand different religions worshiped in Winterfell space, to Mother Rahnnok of the Dornish systems and the Quarians, to the Asari goddess R'hlla and to whatever other gods that would listen. _Please no. Not Her. She'll drive me insane_.

But Her it was. No one else had such a flair for the dramatic. Even the Geth turned and stared as the fighter, blasting out music from nearly six hundred years ago, music thus definitely not recorded in their memory banks, crashed into the ground just off of Shepard's foxhole by thirty-five paces, knocking both geth and them off their feet by the impact blast. From her cover on the ground behind the crates Williams shot back up, her assault rifle levelled towards the intact fighter some fifty paces off, and Alenko made to follow her before Shepard put a hand on his shoulder and stayed his military instincts.

"Stand down" he all but growled, glaring at the ship "both of you. Keep your sights on the Geth. She's a friendly". She? The unspoken question was clear as day upon their faces. "The one in the fighter. She's my sister".

Williams and Alenko looked to each other, blinking in supreme confusion, before they looked back to him.

"Sister?!"

* * *

 _October 17_ _th_ _, 2583_

 _Human Systems Alliance Space_

 _Sunspear_

 _The Martell system, Salthome cluster. The Independent Principalities of Dorne._

 ** _Miranda_**

Democracy, Miranda Lawson had always thought, was a very stupid idea.

"Which is why I am in charge" she looked up from the datapad on her desk in the Cerberus headquarters on Sunspear, her elbows leant on the glass surface of the spartan table and her fingertips together as she regarded the three men standing in front of her. "This is not a democracy. Our esteemed Alliance is not a democracy in anything but name. The Salarians don't practice it, the Turians don't, not even the Volus. The only ones who actually practice democracy" she noted, her anger coming out in her voice like a sword of steel came unsheathed "are the Batarians and the Asari. Tell me, Crabbe, Kim, Jones – do I look like a fucking Asari to you?"

"N-no" Crabbe was, nominally at least, their leader, his accent coloured heavily by the Dornish systems that, past the Stepstone Veil, bordered on Citadel Council space and the vast sectors of the Asari. Behind him Jones, the bald and heavily scarred muscle of the bunch, poked at their leader's side with his elbow, and after a wince he remembered his manners. "No, m'Lady. Of course not, ma'am". Ma'am? Did she look even remotely like she was a military officer? Her persona in Sunspear was that of an information broker, and so she wore naught but Dornish dresses.

"Really?" she wondered, her eyes shifting from one of them to the other, affixing them with her glare each in turn. "Surely nothing but you, members of the common people, and your belief in the fact that all humans have certain unalienable rights, could make you defy my orders so explicitly? I told you. It was the precondition of your service to our organisation: the boy had to be taken alive".

"The kid was squealing something fierce" Kim, the last of them, whose accent was marked by the lit of some unknown slum back on Earth, was a mean one indeed. "Bawling and wailing and bringing the cops down on our heads after we offed his parents and the guards. Doesn't matter what you pay me, lady – I'm not taking my chances to end up in Prince Doran's dungeons. That's where the Red Viper holds court".

"So we slit the kid's throat" Jones spoke up, and Miranda fixed her eyes on him. She could almost see the blood splattered all over him, even though his piecemeal armour was all but spotless. "Sorry, ma'am, but big whoop. So what if he was Valyrian? If you're after someone who looks just like Targaryen kings, all you've got to do is go down to the space port. I know plenty of whores who-"

"You and your whores are missing the big picture" Miranda stood from her chair, slowly and calmly, her face showing not a hint of emotion but for the chill stare of her eyes. She knew that. She had practiced and perfected that look over the years. "Which one of you killed him?" she asked them. Crabbe opened his mouth first, his lips forming the words "I did", but he was too late. Behind him the two had already pointed, to each other. Excuses all, but good enough for Miranda.

She hated to see her plans go down the drain. Loathed it. And, to be honest, she needed to let off some steam.

She had only to focus with a thought to cause the blue-black energy to blaze around her body, charging up before her palms and coiling like serpents of water and smoke around her arms. They had barely enough time to notice that before she lashed out, sending fields of eezo-powered energy blazing through the air. One landed behind Kim's head, snapping his head around with a sickening sound, like dry branches breaking in the Sunspear sun. The other field she summoned was more complex, more powerful, placed above Jones, and the man was yanked off his feet with enough force to smash his head and spine against the ceiling of her office into a bloody mess.

By the time Crabbe had realised what was going on and pulled the gun from his hip to lift it hers was already up, the aim trained on the space between his eyes. "Drop it" she told him as a clade of Cerberus aides, three of her servants in the matters of her daily life, rushed into the room, seeing the bodies and immediately revealing the guns and weapons hidden about their bodies.

"Don't think so" Crabbe spoke back, grinding his teeth together. "You'll shoot me".

"Hardly". Anyone else would have been smirking by now, any other operations commander within her organisation would have. But not she. She wasn't too much for external displays of emotion. She preferred to let her actions speak for her. "You were the sole competent one amongst your happy few, your band of brothers. Their contracts were just terminated, but yours might be open to a renegotiation. My employer, our organisation, is always looking for capable people".

He looked down from her words, down at the mangled heap that was James's remains. "He was an idiot. Both of them were. Fucking idiotic cunts, the both of them. But we served together. We murdered and deserted and bled together" he looked up back to her, his hands shaking around the hilt of his gun. "We're a package. Always have been. Comrades to the end-"

"Well then" Miranda pulled the trigger, and the vid-screen behind Crabbe, suspended on the wall, was shot over with blood. Crabbe's body collapsed to the floor, a smoking hole in his brow, and before enough blood could spill out to permanently stain the carpets her aides moved forth with professional efficiency. Before Miranda had holstered her pistol back on the underside of her desk they had cauterised what could be before they took the bodies away for disposal. Kim, Jones and Crabbe would be sealed into barrels and dumped somewhere far out into the desert.

And the buzzards would have them – along with what other fierce alien monsters that dwelled out in the desert. Sunspear's ecology was nothing short of savage, even if you didn't account for the atmosphere and soil that almost lacked surface moisture entirely. That was partly the reason why the Dornish colonies had never been properly subjugated by the Alliance, even in the days of Aegon.

Two hundred and sixty years since the Conqueror's death, and still his shadow lay heavy over the galaxy. Which, Miranda thought, was a given.

His genes had been superior. Wasn't that the saying? "Valyrians – kings among men, and mad kings all".

Which was why she was so against democracy, even as a concept of an idea. Even Plato, Socrates and Aristotle had lectured that some people were better than others. It was evolution, when you gave it more than a cursory thought. Living beings evolved to better adapt to certain environments, and humans evolved divergently. Some people were fit to be kings by their genes, others were fit better to be slaves. It wasn't, not for her at least, a matter of belief or opinion or political thought.

For her it was genetics. Science. Inexplicable, irrefutable, fact.

And it was only because she had now, so decisively, cleared her schedule that she could allow herself to drift into idle sophistry. She had to debrief an operative in half an hour, check on the status of her undercover footsoldiers in the Dornish fleets in forty-five minutes, and in an hour she had to get dressed to have lunch with Ellaria Sand, the paramour consort of Lord Oberyn Martell, whom she was hoping to induct into the ranks of her organisation's supporters. But before all that she had a break. A short rest, some – she glanced at the clock on the top edge of her datapad – thirty-two minutes. As her aides cleaned out her office of all traces of blood she relaxed back into her chair. Idly, she closed the mission folder tab before her and deleted it, as the kidnapping of Adam Johnsen had thoroughly failed. A botch of a mission, because she, in her over capacitated position as head of the Dragonfly Cell, had outsourced the job to a bunch of ill-tempered recruits. _If you want something done right_ -

Well, no matter. That lent one failure to a list of eight successes. A failure rate of roughly eleven percent. Much better than, for example, the efforts of the Xavier Cell, which was at an almost eighty percent successes to more than twenty percent inconclusive results. Which was little comfort to her, given that the Xavier Cell studied Empaths. And Empaths, as everyone knew, were a myth.

She brought to the fore another of the tabs on her datapad, one that showed, by a cursory glance, the sectors of Dornish space that she, in generally at least. Beyond her own cell's special mission she handled the day-to-day of her organisation's efforts in the sector, being one of the few capable of such intricate multi-tasking. And on the map before each Dornish world was outlined beyond its star, numbers and notices and names hovering about them to provide her with what information she wanted. Still, each of the worlds in the three clusters were as inhospitable as the last.

Few in their right mind lived on the Dornish worlds by choice. It was quite a bit like the Winterfell sector that way, though instead of freezing most worlds in the Dorne cluster were quite the opposite. Sunspear was the norm as a barren dessert world, not the exception. And there were worse. Hellholt, for one. That planet, and its moon, Brimstone, were mining worlds with colonies erected high above streams of flowing lava and molten rock. Only the Dornish perseverance and the mineral richness of many of the worlds in the sector kept them inhabited. Miranda, however, preferred to avoid Dorne for other reasons.

Along the map she found herself casting a glance towards its upper edge, where the Dornish cluster of stars ended and thick shimmering lines showed the expanse of empty space and dead stars that lay between it and the Reach. One little star had a name that drew her eye, even as close to the much more important Three Towers was to it. Solheim.

Solheim. She knew that star system like the back of her hand. Six worlds orbiting a yellow star with a stellar mass of 1.3, with Sol of Earth as the default measuring stock. One was a lush jungle hell with too much rain, one was a frigid wasteland with magnificent ice waterfalls hundreds of miles high, three were thoroughly inhospitable but one, the last one and the innermost one, was all but an island paradise. Besides the poles on that world, Solheim Prime, the only land was a belt of islands going around the entire equator. Setting aside the occasional terrifying monsoon with enough power to down a spaceship, it was more or less an entire planet version of the Caribbean, especially once the imported palm trees had taken root after the terraforming process had been completed. The overlord of the system been given his land and authority by Supreme Commander Jaehaerys Targaryen, second of his name: Henry Solheim.

Her father.

Solheim was a pretentious name, as pretentious in nature as that malignant tumour of a man, and she had changed her name to Lawson, the name her genetic grandparents had before Father became what he was now, when she had escaped him. She might have been born – if that was even the right word? – in his facility in Melbourne on Earth, but on Solheim Prime was where she had been raised.

Paradise. Pah. Rather it was the Stygian pits of the lowest of the Seven Hells dressed up in the trappings of Eden. At least in the last few years it had been like that. Before that-

She scowled before she smoothed her frown and switched the feed, closing down the galactical map tab on her datapad to open up the security feeds from the Cerberus bases across the planet. One was a shielded listening post, another was a transmitter box hooked into the main extranet buoys to give her organisation all the collective information possessed by the people of Sunstone. The last selection of feeds came from a small base on the far side of Sunspear, hidden deep beneath one of its sun-scorched desert mountains, down where the rock cooled them instead of warmed them. It was the best fortified Cerberus base in all of Dornish space, and it was the nervous centre and the pinnacle of all the years of hard work of the Dragonfly Cell.

Some of the foot soldiers called it The Nursery.

"How come there are so many planets and worlds and spaceships and aliens out there?" Illyria was a fat slug of an Asari, blue and slovenly, which was a wondrous thing considering that in order for the Asari to grow corpulent they really had to work on it. Still, it – Miranda refused to acknowledge it as a "she" – was very good with children, and had been with Cerberus since the beginning. The Illusive Man trusted it. Miranda didn't. "Well" the big blue blob began to answer in a drawl "can anyone tell me what the ratio of habitable to inhospitable worlds is? With current technology? Yes, Kelly?"

"One to fifteen!" a small child called out from the group sat on the floor in front of the Asari's slouching perch in that large circular room, meant for far many more children than there already were, her hair flowing down to her back in silver-gold. "Or was it fourteen-?"

"Very good! One world in fifteen is habitable by humans, going by your current technology. And with a little help from the Council" Illyria winked, and the children giggled "that's one in roughly eight and a half. One out of eight of every world in the galaxy that orbits a star. Let's say there's one planet per star. Who can tell me how many stars there are in the galaxy? Yes, Chingis?"

"One hundred thousand million, ma" the boy who answered had his white hair shorn short, though his eyes were the most vividly purple out of all of them, almost shimmering in the artificial sunlight streaming in through the fake window. "Or more". It was odd. Most of those children, the ones who hadn't been weeded out by the testing process, didn't even remember their parents and their families after a few short years. Kidnapped even though they were, somehow they became acclimatised. A testament to all humanity, or only to the Valyrian genomes?

"Yes, or more. Nebulas and other pesky things muck the calculations for us, as well as double stars and binary systems and-" Illyria waved her and rolled her eyes to the children's great delight. "One hundred thousand million divided by fourteen and a half – let's say it's that? That leaves us a little less than seven billion worlds that humans can inhabit. Then again, not all of these are reachable by the Mass Relay network. Then again, again, that doesn't account for all the star systems with nine or more planets, or habitable moons, or space stations and asteroid mines". It sat back on its fatty welts within its spider-silk gown and took in the children's awe. "How many worlds are inhabited by humans? Registered worlds by the Alliance, that is. Can anyone tell me? Jolene?"

The girl who raised her voice was one of the smallest, frail and sickly despite the power of her heritage, her hair shining white and colourless. Miranda didn't have high hopes for that one. "Five hundred and two" she said in a tiny squeak of a voice, and Illyria smiled as if there was nothing wrong with the poor child. _Bloody alien. Probably can't even tell the difference_.

"Yes, five-hundred and two. Counting space stations, officially listed military installations, mining colonies and research outposts. Actual planets number far less, but still, it is remarkable. You humans have come far in a very short time. In five hundred years you have settled so much – half a generation to my race". Illyria spoke slowly, as if its words were profound. "The Asari and the Turians have many more worlds, as do the Salarians. Each. And even they haven't seen all. The galaxy – no, the universe! – is a vast and almost unknowable place. How do we survive it?"

"By sticking together!" the children answered her in chorus, speaking the mantra as one, and Miranda cut the feed, looking to other things. Sighing internally, she rose from the chair in front of her desk. She allowed no emotion to touch her face, ever. It was a mask, her face, perfectly cast from the best possible version of Father's features. Her face was a mask, and she was an actor playing a thousand roles.

Assassin, recruiter, organiser, lead operative of the Dragonfly Cell, spy – she was all of that at once. But her cover was as Myranda, information broker with far-reaching connections. She never confirmed that she had ties to the Shadow Broker or to the Faceless of the Salarian STG, to the Warlocks of the Volus or the Batarian Sons of Harpyji, but she never denied it either. From her office on the fifteenth floor of Dayne Towers, balconies overlooking Nymeria Plaza with the giant walls that blocked out the storms of Sunspear's planetary sandstorms and hostile environment filling the horizon like black mountains made by man. At the centre of the colony, one of the gates just past Nymeria plaza's western edge, stood the great hyper-glass domes of the Water Gardens, where the wealthiest lived. Below her, on the plaza that she saw as she exited onto the balcony in her flowing Dornish dress – a red and gold dress that was part sari, part Mediterranean summer dress with a plunging neckline – people crowded about the business of their day while the wind whipped at her hair.

Merchants and peddlers of all council species went there, down below, haggling over deals from such tiny things as greenhouse grown apples to things such as spaceships, skycars and mercenary companies, amongst stalls and dusty bazaars. Within the coffeehouses and exchanges and smoking bars along the plaza thousands of hopefuls played at the galactic stock market while above lawyers and notaries and information brokers played a game of economics as deadly as it was exhilarating. Sunspear was Ilium without much of the trappings of finery. Even the casinos were less luxurious. But Everyone, even Batarians and lawless mercs, could find their places of home on Sunspear.

Even Quarians were welcome on the Dornish worlds. A mere dozen-or-so years after the colony on Sunspear had been established the Quarians had arrived en masse in flotilla to orbit around the planet as a pit-stop on their way into uncharted Terminus space, the first sentient alien lifeforms humanity had ever encountered. They had scrambled the colony's communications and all but made ready for battle, fearing the same reception they received from all other races in the galaxy. But such had not been the case. Not there, not in Sunspear. Not in the Dorne sector.

Colony Leader, later made Prince in the Quarian fashion, Knight Commander Nymeria Martell, Ph.D., had found a way to negotiate with the Quarians. The flotilla and the colony had both been in need of supplies, and in turn for the colony sharing that little resources it had, even allowing the flotilla ships repair in the Sunspear dry-dock, they had gotten technology. An alliance had been born after that, an alliance whose precondition was that it was to be kept secret from the rest of humanity. Which was easy enough for the Martell governors and Princes. The Systems' Commonwealth had already been well on its way to inevitable collapse by then.

Quarians were welcomed by the people and humans of the Dornish sectors. Some had even tried to settle down world-side and share colonies with the humans, but the inhospitable climates and the weak Quarian immune systems proved such efforts less than fruitful. Still, the Dorne-Quarian Concord had endured. During Aegon's seven years long siege of the Saltstone, Torrentine and Sandhome clusters that made up Dornish space the Quarians had smuggled supplies to the desperate colonies even as the dragonships of the Targaryens rained Valyrian fire down on from orbit, turning entire deserts into glass and levelling cities with every salvo. Despite the hell of war, the bunkers and the Quarians had allowed Dorne to remain free and independent for two centuries longer than all the other human sectors until trade sanctions from the Council races had forced the Alliance to the negotiation table to submit to Dornish terms.

Some humans had even taken up worship of the Quarian religion, praying to Mother Rannoch in temples that the Alliance-sponsored Church of the Seven could do naught about. Dorne had religious freedom and the greatest amount of autonomy of all the human sectors. It was second only to the Winterfell sector and the Iron Verge, which too had religious freedom, after a fashion, if not as many liberties of right and state. And the trade that flowed through the Dornish sectors, from Council space through the Steptones and up into Alliance space and back, allowed Dorne great prosperity.

It was the perfect place for a Cerberus cell. Not merely for its constant flow of information and trade. No, the Dornish were reluctant to forgive slights against their own. And many crimes had been committed by all sides that had wrestled for control of the Alliance during the Usurpation. The victors, it had seemed, had been the one most willing to make the hard choices.

It just happened that the one who eventually won had less than a speck of Targaryen in him, and a hatred for all things Valyrians. He seized the forward base on Dragonstone for his own and proclaimed that those who had dominant Valyrian traits to be Targaryen sympathisers and enemies of the state. Cerberus would have willingly supported Baratheon in other things, but past that point they abandoned him for pastures new and better candidates to back.

For, and this was the important part: Humanity was young. Salarians, Turians, Asari, Krogan, even Quarian, Volus and Elcor – they all had thousands of years on humans in the galactic community. They had more colonies, greater armies, older institutions, more powerful technology. But in the days of Aegon their little species, young and reckless, had been a threat to them all. Why?

Dragonships.

Dragonships, for all their destructive potential, were all but indestructible. Valyrian steel ships, made from an impossible alloy. Not only was the metal a dense mixture of elements almost impossible to get quite right, any deviation leaving the material either brittle or too soft, but there was another factor to it: Radiation.

The sun of Oros had been a strange thing, a small star on the edge of the main Valyrian Fringe, long since dead. In its infancy an event, indescribable to most, had brought matter seemingly foreign to the general make-up of the galaxy into the star, changing its fission process and radically affecting its radiation output. The few rays it had cast had been unlike anything recorded before or since. Its effect on certain materials was nothing short of unparalleled. And, along with the genetic manipulation of the first settlers that resulted in the Valyrian genome, so striking in appearance –

With ships and swords and powered armour made out of Valyrian steel, with biotics and genetically enhanced soldiers on their side, five systems of forty settlements and installations at its greatest point had weathered the might of the entire Terminus and all the armies of the Batarian Hegemony. When the Fringe was destroyed almost all secrets to Valyrain technology was lost.

What little remained did so only by the words of the first Mother of the State, Visenya, the secrets she had documented. Like the dragonships, however, these relied on two Targaryen principles to be accessed:

Fire, and Blood.

Personally she didn't understand the Fire part of that equation. Fire was merely the rapid oxidation of a material in the exothermic chemical process of combustion. But blood-

Blood, lineage, genetics – that she understood best of all, of all the members of her organisation at least. And while other cells in her organisation chased after shadows and did nothing but spy and assassinate and play at politics, her mission's final outcome would reshape the entirety of the galaxy forever-

A soft chime sounded from the implant in her ear, and as she straightened from the balcony rail she hadn't even noticed that she had leant against she turned back towards her office with its mats and opulent decorations worthy of an ancient Earth hacienda, the datapad on her desk the source of this new intrusion. She hurried towards it, picked it up in a sweep of a motion before she eyed its screen almost a little apprehensively. It was a secure channel, accessed only by her employer: the Illusive Man. And he would only message her if- if-

Yes, she was being resigned. But the terms of her reassignment were what made her internally nod and agree rather than internally seethe. Still her face remained impassive as she cleared her schedule for the afternoon and sent a message to her replacement as head of the Dragonfly Cell, congratulating them. Once those few arrangements had been made she turned towards the rear wall, far behind her desk. She touched her hand to the painting of Nymeria to the side of it and spoke the passwords loudly and clearly, and the wall was revealed to be a pane that could slide aside, revealing within:

Her weapons, submachine guns and Omni-tools optimised for combat hacking and covert operations, heavy pistols and trick grenades and biotic enhancers. At the centre of it all hang her operations apparel, a skin-tight suit of ablative material lined with biotic feed-back wells, white and black. And over the breast of it, by the shoulder above the heart, was the symbol of her organisation.

A jagged golden C all but closed and turned on end, supported on either side by chevrons out of orange-gold. Three marks. Many heads. One goal: conquer the future for humanity, no matter the cost. As she looked at the secret logo she allowed herself a rare, non-internal, self-congratulatory smile.

 _Behold the Cerberus_.

* * *

 _October 17th, 2583_

 _Human Systems' Alliance Space_

 _Eden Prime_

 _The Redwyne Verge, the Reach._

 ** _Rhea_**

They were Geth _. Obviously_. Either that or some really anorexic Cylons. And she really did have a fondness for the classics of pre-spaceflight Earth. Those had been simpler days, before the Alliance.

But now they lived in evil days. You had to be mean to survive. And she was the meanest badass in all the galaxy.

The Geth – she counted three of them through the cockpit windows, plus two hovering devices which she assumed were some manner of recon drones – stood stock still before the fighter she had commandeered off the SSV Moscow, internal processors whirring. No doubt they hadn't been programmed for this eventuality. Their blockade had been a right arse to get through. She was the only one of the volunteers that had made it. She scanned the surroundings and instantly made up a plan of attack. _Standard Hello Sailor act should do the trick_.

While they were distracted she struck. She overloaded the regulators that handled the fighter's water reserves, and her helmet clicked shut before her face as the cockpit filled with steam and boiling water, pulling a selection of grenades into her hands. When the hatch opened the steam poured out, thick as fog, obfuscating the Geth's ocular sensors, and after she rigged a handgun propped up against the dashboard of the controls to fire in eight seconds she held the grenades in one hand while her other went to the handle of the rifle on her back, her thumb against the centre of her palm. She counted – 3, 2, 1 – and then she sprung.

The Geth never knew what hit them. The first grenades arched and sizzled as they landed at their feet before arcs of electricity shot out from them like bolts of lightning, hitting and overloading their shields with as much as a need for an EMP. They staggered, one thrown off its feet, and were unprepared when the handgun in the cockpit began firing aimlessly at them. Predictably, they responded, filling the fighter with bolts of energy and utterly ripping its insides to shreds.

But she wasn't there anymore. The last grenade was on a delayed timer, and blew in the very same instant as she fired her sniper rifle from the ruined habitat thirty paces to their left, taking down two Geth all at once. She reloaded just in time for the last one to turn to her and look down the barrel of her rifle from across the distance. She wondered if it was frightened as it stared death in the eye.

And then she smirked as she shot it through the head.

She slung the rifle onto her back as she rose, the internal servos whirring as the weapons internal reactor cooled down, and smirked as she walked out into the devastation. She stopped and stared at the husks of people strewn about around the habitats of that forward camp, scowling at their metal parts and bio-mechanical eyes, before she went on with less than a shrug. All would be made apparent in time when she talked to the one in charge of the Alliance soldiers on ahead of her, coming out of their makeshift barricades.

One of them was a Sentinel specialist, by the looks of him and his armour class, scruffy and handsome enough despite his ridiculous combed-back hair, in the gold and yellow armour with black trims of central command, the Baratheon fleets of Earth and Arcturus Station, and light standard specialist weaponry, the lion and stag of his regiment badge on his left shoulder. Another was a woman, an infantry soldier of the rank-and-file going by her heavy armour, her assault rifle and the shape of the helmet on her head, her armour painted blue with grey and black trims with her left shoulder pauldron showing the armoured knight on the prancing destrier of Risley and the Eden system's defence forces, a subdivision of the Redwyne Fleet, in turn a subdivision of the High Armada of the Reach, the largest single military force in Alliance space. But neither her nor the specialist really mattered.

The last she smirked on seeing. His armour was black, trimmed with red and double white stripes down his right shoulder, his left bearing the same regiment badge as the specialist. But the rest of his armour in the black in red were N7 colours, just like hers. Targaryen colours, given to the N7 elite of the Alliance special forces when an N7 squad had pulled Supreme Commander Daeron's, the first by that name, ass out of the fire on Hellholt, along with the white stripe that made them all equal in standing to members of the Supreme Commanders' personal guard.

It was an honour, not afforded many, even amongst all the thousands of soldiers that served in the Alliance military. Most who wore the Black and Red knew each other at a glance.

And she definitely knew that one. Of course she did. She had shared a womb with him once.

"Stop right there!" Her mirth was smothered in its infancy as the woman in Risley colours stood straight, levelling the barrel of her assault rifle her way. She seemed tired, hollow-cheeked and blue around the eyes, clearly worn down to the bone – but that never excused pointing the business end of a firearm at a superior officer. "Stand and unfold yourself! Name, rank, service number!"

"Name, rank and service number, huh?" She glared back at that woman before she slowly, as not to get an unwanted ventilation hole in her skull, reached up to remove her helmet. It came off with a hiss of equalising air, and as she lifted it her hair, coloured fiery red, fell down almost to her shoulders. "Lieutenant Commander Sir Rhea Shepard, S-01-01-CH6-5404-J1143-N7. Vale of Arryn Outrider Fleet, Corbray Wing, Stone Crows Company, Executioner Squad". She cocked her head to the side, still glaring. "Our company motto is 'Eat Their Hearts'. Now" she raised her voice gradually until she was shouting like a drill sergeant at the top of her voice "lower that rifle, soldier, before I shove my boot so far and fast up your ass it'll trigger a geological event!"

"Shit!" The woman spluttered as she hurriedly slung the rifle over her shoulder onto the magnetic holster on her back and promptly snapped into salute. "Gunnery chief Ashley Williams, ma'am! At your service, ma'am! I'm sorry that I-!"

"You're godsdamn right you're sorry, Sergeant!" she stalked over to the woman and put her helmet all up in her face, taller than her by a good margin. "If you do shit like that again, Williams, I'll have your tight little ass on latrine duty before you can say whatever the fuck your retarded company motto is!" Williams blinked, having not been spoken to like that since boot camp, and Rhea smiled happily at the sight. "Stand down, Sergeant" she chuckled, glancing over at the stunned specialist who had yet to open his mouth. "You too, Lieutenant Stud-Muffin. I've gotta go get a sit-rep from my little brother".

And so she walked on past them, and Yohn followed her as they went to stand by the side of one of the ramshackle habitats, his helmet half a head above hers in his slightly taller height. Except for facial structure, the shape of the eyes and clefts in their chins and the hue of their skins they hardly seemed related at all, for most looked to eyes and hair for lineage, and hers were different by design. His should have been, too.

"'Little brother', really? We're twins". After all those years spent apart, only seeing each other for shore leave and holidays, and that was the first thing he said. "You've coloured your hair".

"Yeah" she nodded and lifted a strand of her hair by the fingerpads of her black gauntlet, the tresses fiery red. "Black wasn't working for me, and blue hair goes together with black and red armour like asbestos and sandwiches". She looked up at him and frowned, at his eyes especially. They should have been green, like hers were right then. "Why the fuck aren't you wearing your lenses?"

"They chafe" he complained like the stuck-up, goody-two-shoes, boyscout of a brat that he was. "And the visor almost makes them look blue, right? Besides, I've got medals by the bunch. They won't fire me for lying about not being half-Valyrian. Not with my face, and yours, on all the recruitment adds".

"Yeah, but the mere suspicion of Valyrian blood is enough for someone in the Criminal Investigations' Departments of our respective fleets to request access to our records" she hissed back and took him by the ridiculously thick upper arm and dragged him a little bit away. "White hair and purple eyes, bro. If they find out that our genetic records and blood samples are falsified-"

"They won't" Yohn shook his head back at her, and she fumed at his naiveté. "Doctor Chakwas have updated them, verifying Septon Cyrus's and Doc Meria's mock-ups-" She sighed as she put her helmet back onto her head.

"If they do" she interrupted him, shaking him just a bit "they'll subpoena our actual blood samples. And if they find out we're half genetically modified heavy-worlders from off of Last Hearth, half Valyrian from Tyria-"

"Yeah" he nodded at last, lips pressed together hard. "I know. The current administration's not very keen on Valyrians. Especially Supreme Commander Baratheon. They equate sharing genes and lineage with being a Targaryen sympathiser, hence Goldcloaks kicking in people's doors and" he made a face. "Firing squads. Yeah, I know. But they won't do it to us, even if _they_ know. You and I are some of the best soldiers in the-"

"If you think that will stop them" she forced out a breath through clenched teeth and shook her head. "They can come for us in the night, shot us in the back, blow up our ships – and still tell the public that we died like heroes. Faces to the fire, banners gallantly streaming behind us, three volley salutes, the works. Politicians are fucking spiders, Yohn. If you think our perceived use will stop them from crossing-off threats against their rule, real or otherwise, you are either incredibly naïve or really fucking obtuse".

"And you're being much too cynical" he shot back, to which she only gave him a silent look. "Cynical and ruthless, just like always". She didn't answer him with words. "What?"

" _Valarr Morghulis_ ". Valyrian words. Batarian, Colonial Standard Dialect, stolen and twisted and morphed by the first settlers in the Valyrian Fringe for ease of use. " _Memento mori_ , Yohn. They'll come for us if we aren't careful. And despite your kinetic barriers and your damned kung-fu bullshit luck you aren't invincible".

"I believe in the Alliance, in our cause, in our government, in the military. I believe our COs would do the right thing. You used to believe that, too" he told her back, and though the accusation stung she showed it nothing. Closing his eyes he sighed and put his hand to the brow of his helmet. "Let's not do this, okay? I'm sorry, I'll wear the damn lenses. I hate it when we fight".

"Yeah" she admitted finally, after grinding her teeth quite a bit "me too. Look, let's just-" he opened his arms with a silent question, and she stepped back, raising a fist. "Don't even try! No chick-flick moments, okay? Let's get this mission back on track" she glanced up at the sky and the unstoppable ship still present in their view "so we can get the flying fuck away from that thing. What's the sit-rep? SNAFU?"

"Situation Normal: All Fucked UP? In a word: yes". He looked over to her fighter and noted the destruction that it had dealt as well as it had been dealt as if it was par for the course. "Your fleet was in the region?"

"We got a dispatch from the one of the Terminus bases, saying their patrols are being shredded along some quadrants of frontier space". From which bases she did not know. Lots of installations were classified, need-to-know only. "Corbray wing was sent to relieve the Normandy as soon as Anderson's dispatched reached us. Ever since Elysium was hit seven years ago-"

"The Reach has defence priority" he finished for her. It was all rather unfair, though. Most raids and slavers had hit Winterfell space much worse than the Reach, but the Reach held the largest minority of the people of the Alliance with its very populous and verdant worlds. "We've got to get a Beacon. Some Prothean artefact. Geth-"

"-definitely Geth, right?" she asked him, cocking her head to the side. She wasn't surprised that they had come to the same conclusion. When they were children it was as if their minds had been linked by how easily one of them could tell what the other was thinking, and though it wasn't something he had ever believed in or something that was very pronounced these days-

"Aye, aye" he nodded. And yet still they were linked. She could feel it. Down to the bone. Down in the blood. "And yeah, they're after it".

"Thought so". _Well, that makes it business as usual_. "Secure package, kill everyone and everything that gets in the way?" She wondered, and frowned when he replied in the affirmative. "No search-and-rescue? No civilian babysitting?"

"Captain hadn't any orders about it" he forced out through his teeth. _There it is_. "We aren't supposed to be looking for survivors".

"No distractions" she shrugged. He was the one to worry about everyone but himself. "Good. Just the way I like it". By his look she gave him a smile, showing that she was, at least partially, jesting. "Knowing you, we're supposed to look for them anyway". When his silence spoke in the affirmative she stood back and clasped her hands together behind her back, at ease. "You got any other directives for me, L-C?"

"You're letting me take point on this one?" he cocked a pale eyebrow at her, dark enough to pass for platinum blonde but only just. " _You_?" So she had questioned his authority and defied his orders during basics and N7 training. That was no reason for _that_ particular tone. "Just like that?" he crossed his arms before his barrel chest. "What's your angle?"

"Don't be an ass, bro". She punched him in the arm, a blow neither of them felt thanks to the armour they wore. "If I think you're abandoning the mission for selling cookies and giving out free backrubs to flesh-eating monsters, I'll be sure to let you know" she strode on partially past him, looking towards the two people he had with him where they were standing by a Geth carcass up ahead. "Your team. Solid?"

"The Specialist's Lieutenant Kaidan Alenko". "He's solid. Keeps his cool. Sentinel". "Strictly support, though. Doesn't like using his biotics on organics". "You've met Williams. Her, I don't know too well, but she seems the survivor type-"

"Yeah" she couldn't help but snicker at him. "She's your type, alright". He blushed and coughed awkwardly as she looked over to the woman in question. "Infantry grunt. Good with a rifle?" he nodded. "Good" she nodded back and turned back to him. "No further questions, Commander Shepard".

"Thank you, Commander Shepard" he replied, their own little in-joke. Somehow, despite being organised into different regiments after completing basic training, they had always been of the same rank until they wound up at N-School together, at which point she had raced ahead of him a little. "We're heading out" he called out to his troops as they went to join the two, and she fell in line as Yohn led the way, with Alenko behind her and Williams bringing up the rear.

Almost needless to say, the inane questions began soon after. "Permission to speak, ma'am?" the voice of Lieutenant Alenko came to her as they made their way from the archaeology camp towards the spaceport, far enough away from the now ruined arcologies of Constant to filter out the sound from the shuttles taking off and arriving but close enough for comfort. "With all due respect, ma'am" he spoke tentatively, and she could feel an asskicking coming on. "I've heard of your brother, but never you. I never knew Commander Shepard had a sister".

"Most people in the Vale don't know that Commander Shepard has a brother" she smirked as she went, giving him only the most cursory of glances over her shoulder. "I'm strictly command, infiltration, assassination and sabotage, soldier". Unlike her brother, the biotic basher of Batarians, she actually worked with some finesse. "Being seen, being known, is not in my job description". And if she did her job right the only way one knew she had been there was by all the dead bodies. "In spite of my entrance, that is". She had needed to get Yohn's attention somehow. And it had worked to distract the Geth well enough, hadn't it?

"Ma'am-" she craned her head around and looked the specialist right in the eye, to which he inclined his head and averted his gaze. Still he went on with his question. "Commander Yohn was knighted by The Supreme Commander after Shepard's Hill on Elysium. How come you share a surname?"

"Because I'm family, I get perks" she suggested, rolling her eyes at him even as they went on towards their objective, climbing a ridge with jagged cliffs above them on all sides but back and forwards. "I was knighted too, in '78. By Prime Minister Arryn. But I go by Shepard since 'Sir Rhea of Torfan' sounds like crap". By her tone she told him that the subject was done for and over.

And thankfully they had a long while of uninterrupted silence, a silence that made Yohn worry for some reason. As they crested the ridge she crouched low and pulled her sniper rifle off her back.

The Eden Prime Spaceport was built according to the standard templates of the Reach colonies – blocky, severe, greys and darks all around that the locals had in vain attempts tried to lighten up with posters for vids and commercials and great murals of roses, flowers, trees and Earth fauna in all its kindly variations. Paradise pictures stood in stark contrast against them as all around the devastation was palpable, even if that gargantuan shape in the sky seemed to have moved much farther away. Bodies lay here and there, many felled with blaster fire along with several downed Geth. When they headed up the ramps she could tell that the machines had been handled expertly, all by the same firearm given the points of impact and their shapes, in rapid bursts and swift movement. She wondered who had -

"Commander" Alenko said, looking on ahead at a shape in dark maroon armour that lay prone on the loading platform just ahead, and Yohn turned his gaze towards it readily. "It's Nihlus".

"Nihlus?" she asked as they approached that downed shape, Yohn's eyes darkening visibly behind his helmet's visor. "What's a Nihlus-" she had already begun to ask when she all but stood over it and realised that it was a Turian, a soldier of some kind. "Oh".

"A Turian?" Gunnery chief Williams asked as she looked down on the alien corpse, the fringe jutting from the back of its dinosaur-like head coloured dark blue, almost black, by pool and mess of coagulated blood. "You know him?"

"He's a spectre" Alenko said, crouching over the body, looking it over with a grim severity that clearly said that he couldn't suffer much more death in his life right then. "He was with us on the Nor-"

"Something's moving!" Williams exclaimed, and she turned her rifle about and swivelled towards the spot, her barrel pointed there in the very same instant as Yohn angled his shotgun the same way. "There! Over behind those crates!"

A rattle rose from the crates by the far corner of the platform, a large gathering even compared to the metallic crates rummaged all around them, filled with nothing goods and colonial essentials. "Wait!" a snivelling man's voice could be heard. "Don't shoot!" Two hands shot up over the edge of the barrier he had hid behind. "I'm one of you!" And with it, as he rose, came the fellow himself, in a dirty mechanic's overall and a cap on his head bearing the crest of Lord Risley in stylised form. "I'm human!"

Rhea scoffed, keeping her gun pointed at the yellow spot in the survivor's right eye even when the others lowered their guns. "Sneaking up on us like that is a good way to get shot".

"I" he looked to her, swallowing his fear. "I'm sorry. I-I was hiding" he stammered still as he explained himself. "My name's Powell" he went on as her brother approached him, hands making calming motion like the survivors was nothing but a skittish horse. "I saw what happened to that Turian" he gulped again, looking confused as he locked eyes with Yohn. "The other one shot him"".

By the look of how the back of Yohn's head tilted half an inch to one side and bent slightly forwards she knew that there hadn't been more than one Turian on the Normandy crew. "I need to know how Nihlus died" he said, and he sounded none too pleased.

"The other one got here first" the survivor stammered out in explanation. "He was waiting when your friend showed up. He called him Saren" he seemed to only just remember that detail. "I think they knew each other. Your friend seemed to relax. He let his guard down" he swallowed again "and Saren killed him. Shot him right in the back. I'm just lucky he didn't see me behind those crates".

"What about the Beacon?" She asked of him, and his eyes shot to her, rabbit-like and skittish. "The Prothean artefact found outside the settlement? What happened to it?" Yohn went on, clarifying.

"It's over on the other platform" the survivor pointed down the paths, from the loading platforms towards the transport trains that carried it across the acceleration lanes of the shuttles and the frigates. "Probably where that Turian Saren was headed. He hopped on the cargo train after killing your friend". Suddenly he seemed to find his courage, his voice growing sharp as he shook his head. "I knew that beacon was trouble. Everything's gone to the Seven Hells after we found it". And now he was seething, huffing. "First that damn mother ship showed up, then the attack. They killed everyone. Everyone!" Anger, anger and guilt and relief and all too much fear was in him as he shouted. "If I hadn't hidden behind those crates I'd be dead-!"

A pulse rifle shot, loud in the quiet but for the distant roaring of that ship so far above them, cut short his word, and Powell was thrown back and away, his upper body in bleeding smoking pieces from the blast. At once the four of them turned and hunkered down, diving for cover, Yohn before Williams and the specialist Lieutenant before her to shield them with kinetic barriers. The shots fired towards them from farther down the piers, shots that had ended Powell's life, came from the Geth advancing towards them.

Seven Geth, with all kinds of weaponry, led by one big bastard twice their size and weight in much heavier armour, were approaching them. She took stock – all in all they had one grenade left. One grenade, two over-worked biotics, and not a heavy weapon between them against machines designed with the sole intent to kill. In truth she liked those odds.

She looked over to the other crates, saw Yohn glancing over the side of his cover, his face hard as he looked to the corpse of Powell or Peter or whatever his name had been. He then looked to the front and the bogies approaching there, and the hard snarl on his face changed into a grin as his eyes found hers.

He was grinning. Just like she was. Surrounded by death, destruction, blood and mayhem.

 _Feels just like home_.

* * *

END

* * *

 **A/N** : I couldn't figure out a good way to end this chapter, so cliffhanger it is.

These first few chapters are pretty heavy on the exposition and light on plot, after the very first chapter establishes the tone the series is going for. Most chapters will be well over ten thousand words long, each featuring the perspectives of at least two POV characters, united by theme or location.

Pairings are a toss-up at this point. I'm loath to go with the most popular pairings just because, though. If you have suggestions on which pairings you'd like to see, don't be shy and provide them, but do kindly motivate your suggestions. The romance sub-plots, after all, heavily colours the story of the main characters.

Lastly, three notes about the setting: each sector in the Alliance is obligated to provide two fleets to the military, hence why some territories hesitate about applying for Sector status. These are one defence fleet, incorporating infantry forces and defence troops, and one outrider fleet, to be employed where needed by High Command out of Arcturus Station. Fleets are divided into regiments, each regiment or wing under the command of one Lord Commander in service to the Lord Admiral of the Fleet. Each regiment in turn consist of companies under the lead by one Knight Commander, whose title is equivalent of Knight Captain if in charge of a spaceship.

It is common for regiments or more distinguished companies to have their own mottos, adopting the House or Personal Words of their commanders or words important to their company legend.

Lastly, each regiment's crest of arms, seen on the left shoulder pauldrons of each soldier's armour, is the personal crest of arms of their Lord Commander's, and every soldier's armour is painted in the colours of their individual fleets. The right shoulder pauldron and the shape of the helmet informs the trained observer of rank and soldier type.

(I won't even pretend that those details aren't heavily inspired by Warhammer 40.000).

Anyway, I hope you've enjoyed this chapter. The best is yet to come.

Ta.


End file.
